I've never used linux before, and I've read many posts of people here discussing the great advantages of it.

Question 1: What's so great about it?

Question 2: What's the advantage of gaining "root"? What does that let you do?

Those answers will depend on who you ask. Most people you ask #1 will tell you it's openness and the freedom associated with it to do whatever you want. But of course "Linux" does not always equal "open". Tivo, Archos, and Android are a few Linux-based devices that are based on Linux, yet have a lot of closed doors to them.

Gaining root access to a Linux operating system essentially allows you total freedom on the device to change the system in any way you want. Now the challenge is of course, you need to know "how" to change it. If you are unfamiliar with the system, then simply logging in as root does you no good. But the access is there, so you could always learn and conquer it later.

Thanks, that's a pretty solid answer.

What kinds of things would you change? And how do you do that (ie what kind of programming knowledge would I have to have)?

Sorry, I'm new to open source OS, I have a Mac, but I don't do any programming or writing script etc. I just like not having any viruses, and it's super user-friendly.

I have a Mac as well, they're very much a Unix system under the hood too if you launch a Terminal window. I'm not a programmer either in any way, but I do work as a Unix Systems Engineer at the day job. Sometimes it's nice to be able to look at log files from the command line to see what the system is doing behind the scenes. For instance, if you can't connect to a Wifi network it might help to look at logs under /var/logs from command line. You don't need to be root to do that, but it helps to know it's there.

You might want to configure SSH access. I'm not sure if it's enabled by default, but that might require root access to edit files under /etc.

You may want to add in some information under /etc/resolve so DNS queries work properly.

Or, if you have another computer on the network at home, you'll need root access to mount an NFS share into the N900 filesystem. If you wanted to mount a Windows share and Samba-Client packages aren't installed, you may need to get those packages installed (provided they're available), and then you'll need to mount that share.

You might want to setup another user on the system that you can use to FTP or SCP files (upload files) to the N900 through. You'd need root access to initially setup the user, and then enable SSH if it's not already, or enable/install some sort of FTP server to listen for connections.

There's lots of non-programming things you can do with root access.

Also, don't let any of that scare you. I'm willing to bet as a Mac user, you probably didn't even know that your Mac is running Unix underneath all that fancy Leopard OS coating (BSD to be specific) Linux is just another flavor of Unix. You can use the N900 without knowing any Linux programming or command-line at all. I don't think they designed it for people only familiar with Linux. But what's nice is they did build it with those folks in mind so in the event you do want to tinker with it, all the tools are there for you to do so.

So yeah, don't think this device isn't for you if you don't know anything about Linux. Android also runs Linux under the hood, as does Palm's WebOS. And the iPhone also runs a Unix kernel I believe, and all of those phones are designed for the general public to use and enjoy.

Hello,

I had pretty much the exact same question you did, Carefree, a while ago. Wanting to know more it has resulted in this thread http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=34865&page=2. Admins moved it to "off topic," because it focuses not only on what can be done with the N900, but also on Linux in general.

Wow, that was mostly over my head. I've used other people's FTP clients before, and I can see that being useful when you're out of your house and want access to your computer.

I'll have to do some more reading on the subject. Most documentation that I read about Linux is all the same: It's more stable. I don't doubt that, but is the OS on the iPhone really unstable (I know Windows is, or at least used to be)?

I would have to have much more OS knowledge to take advantage of the things you mentioned.

I guess I want to see what people are going to come up with for this phone (app wise).

Answer to 1:

http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2...o-i-use-linux/

The point of 'gaining root' is more about what it implies: That you're not root, normally. Most Windows users I know end up with letting their login account have Admin rights, because otherwise everything just gets too cumbersome. Which lets them open to every kind of attack there is.

On a Mac the user account and the admin (root) account are separated, and 'system' work is done via 'sudo', which we also have, which allows certain privileged commands to be run by an unprivileged user account.

On Linux the user never logs in as root to do general work. Except that I've heard about newcomers doing this, to begin with, because coming from Windows, they thought that was OK if the computer was a single-user computer. It's not so. Because of this some versions of GUIs on Linux won't even let you log in as root. You have to log in as yourself, and then use sudo or something else from there.

Now, to gain root: On some Linux-based systems, e.g. Android, (and other systems like the OS on the iPhone, as far as I know) root is 'locked out', i.e. not accessible for the owner of the device. Which means that you can only install applications approved by the authorized application manager app., for example. You can only do what the designer set out to allow you to do. On the Maemo devices you are free to 'gain root', if you want to, although you will have to consciously install the necessary software to do so, so that it won't happen just by accident. Having gained root, you can change almost anything on the device, and install whatever you want, and you're also free to render your device utterly useless. The point is that it's your device, so it's your choice. But for normal use you don't have root privileges, so to 'click' on something in a web page can't just damage your system via javascript or something.

There's " linux the operating system," which normal users don't see, and the UI which is how most people relate to linux. Android and WebOS use "linux the operating system" but put their own UI on top. maemo has some custom UI components but shares a great deal with desktop machines. Sharing UI components makes it much easier, in some cases trivial, to port software from a desktop environment to maemo.

Some of the capabilities someone might like to add to maemo require administrator access, which is called "root" on linux. On linux you don't run as administrator usually to a) make it more difficult for the user to screw up the machine b) make it more difficult for other people to screw up the machine.

Just a couple of days ago I paired my wiimote with my n800 so that I can control the media player more safely while driving. https://garage.maemo.org/projects/wiicontrol/ I don't recall if that requires root access, but on a linux netbook I used admin access to use the wiimote as a mouse. This was different software though. When I get my n900 I hope to be able to use that with tv out though admittedly I have not looked up how to use tv out yet.

This is not something you can do on most cell phones without voiding the warranty which is why sanctioned root access is a big deal.